Biological chemical and/or biochemical assessments are carried out daily in diverse arenas such as universities and industry. For example, phenotype assessment is critical to trace the metabolic abilities of certain bacteria and fungi as well as mammalian cells. However, current technologies for such assessments are generally restricted to using gene chips or micro titer plates. These current methods have critical limitation of requiring huge sample volumes of several tens or hundreds milliliters for the assessments. Moreover, expensive robotic systems are often required to handle samples.
In the last two decades, thousands of microfluidic components have been developed to explore the potential benefits of microfluidic systems over conventional systems, including reduction of reagent volumes, fast response times, well-controlled reaction condition, parallel processing, etc. However, there are limited numbers of reports on microfluidic platforms conducting a service of biological processes on a single microfluidic device.